PEACHTREE MANOR HOTEL: THEN AND NOW
RGF 688.004 in the Ronald Goldstein (D.D.S.) Family Papers collection, courtesy of the Ida Pearle and Joseph Cuba Archives for Southern Jewish Life, William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum, Atlanta, Georgia
The Peachtree Manor Hotel originally existed outside the scope of Jewish Atlanta. It was designed and built in 1924 by an Atlantan architect, Neel Reid, and his firm Hentz, Reid, and Adler; the same firm that, coincidentally, built the flagship Rich’s Department Store building in downtown Atlanta. It wasn’t until the early 1950s that ownership passed to the hands of Marvin Goldstein and his brother, who were dentists attempting to enter the hotelier world. They ultimately secured their place in history by making the Peachtree Manor Hotel the first racially integrated hotel in Atlanta, a significant decision in a state where the divisive and racist Jim Crow Laws were still in effect.
The Jewish community and the African American community in Atlanta have a complicated relationship. While both were minorities that experienced hate and prejudice, Jewish immigrants were, for the most part, white, meaning that they were afforded many more privileges than the African American community. Some historians have argued that the presence of African Americans meant that the Jewish
immigrants were “shielded” from anti-semitism in ways they would not have otherwise been. Although there might have been some understanding regarding how it felt to be different, and in some instances members of the Jewish community stood up for civil rights, Jews were not as a collective anti-racist, nor did they always fight for their African American neighbors.
More than just a metaphorical term, Jewish immigrants and the Black community were physically neighbors in the early 20th century. The Southside neighborhood bordered African American neighborhoods on either side - Summerhill to the east and Mechanicsville to the west. There also were a considerable amount of African Americans who lived in the Southside as well, leading to many interactions and intermingling between the two communities. Jews conducted business with the Black community, sold merchandise to them, and were the first people to hire them in their shops and businesses. Jewish immigrants, especially eastern European and Sephardic immigrants, experienced poverty much
The blue outline indicates roughly where the Southside would have been, demonstrating its overlap with the surrounding black neighborhoods. Map courtesy of Georgia State University Archives
like the Black community did, adding to their shared struggle, although Jewish immigrants had a much greater chance at upwards mobility than most African Americans. Complicating the relationship between the two communities further, it became common in the first half of the twentieth century for affluent Jews to employ African Americans as housekeepers of their homes and estates. This dynamic was notably portrayed in Alfred Uhry’s 1987 play Driving Miss Daisy, which was later turned into a movie. While in some ways there was sympathy between the two communities, it did not mean that all relationships were equal and equitable.
Members of the Black-Jewish Coalition in 1984. Starting from the right: John Lewis,Cecil Alexander, Coretta Scott King
The lynching of Leo Frank in 1915, and the subsequent revitalization of the Ku Klux Klan, exacerbated fears within the Jewish community of anti-semitism, and led to a community wide retreat from visible society. In accordance with this step back, fewer Jews felt comfortable speaking out against racism and Jim Crow, afraid of making themselves a greater target than they already felt. It was not until Rabbi Rothschild at the Temple began paving the way for greater Jewish involvement in the civil rights movement that the Jewish community of Atlanta began advocating more for their neighbors. In the early 1980s, Civil Rights leader John Lewis worked together with Cecil Alexander to form the Atlanta Black-Jewish Coalition, in an effort to unite the two communities and the anti-discrimination work they both partake in.
Today, the greatest visible achievement of the relationship of these two distinct, yet overlapping communities is the election of John Ossoff and Reverend Raphael Warnock to the Georgia Senate; together, the two of them make history as the first Jewish senator and Black senator from Georgia. With that said, it is important to recognize that the Jewish community had its flaws when it came to standing for their Black neighbors; as white people in the south, there was still room for them to take the easy way out. While there has been monumental progress since the early 1900s, there is still more that the community could do to support its neighbors. Today, the Peachtree Manor Hotel is no longer a hotel, and instead functions as an apartment building.
